Field of the Invention
The invention relates in general to computing systems, and particularly to, systems and methods for handling electronic messages.
Description of the Related Art
In a modern business environment, it is common for co-workers to communicate using electronic messaging systems such as email and instant messaging. These systems allow co-workers to communicate, by the sending and receiving of messages. Other entities such as databases and calendars are also commonly used in such environments to assist in the business processes being use by individual companies, and these can be referenced in messages such as emails. Collaborative working allows for the creation of entities, such as documents, within a system that can be shared with one or more users. The ability for any one individual to access such entities is typically controlled by an access control system. Permissions are set on an entity to establish who may see or access the entity. Entities may, in turn, contain other entities and/or may contain references to other entities, each of which is additionally protected by particular access control settings.
Collaborative working allows for the sharing of entities, such as documents, between individuals. When sharing these entities, it is common for a link to the entity, rather than the contents of the entity, to be created and sent to one or more individuals via a message. There are many reasons for this, but primarily pertains to the fact that the information contained within the entity remains protected by the access control system. In email terms, a document link is created. This link may be included within an email, and the email is distributed to one or more individuals. This can also be extended to a situation where a (document) link is copied by one user and transmitted to another user via, for example, instant messaging technologies. Upon receipt of the document link, users can use the link to attempt to open the target entity, which depending on the user's ability to access/open the link, will either succeed or fail. Since the target entity may itself contain other entities either embedded or referenced via document links, being able to open the initial root entity does not guarantee the user being able to see the other related entities. This means that the ability of users to receive a link is distinct from their ability to subsequently view the contents of the link. This mismatch has two potential negative side effects.
For example, a message may be sent to the correct recipient, but with an incorrect access control in place, for an object in the message. Users for whom the object was correctly intended, but for whom the access control on the entity are incorrect, cannot access the information. The effect of this situation is that the user attempts to access the entity or an entity contained/referenced by the entity and cannot do so because of the incorrect permissions. The consequence of this is the inability of one or more individuals to access the information, which may impair decision making Remediation must be sought to rectify the situation, which requires additional time and resources. This can be particularly problematic in situations where information is shared between teams in different time zones. Faced with this situation users may resort to a copy and paste of the entire contents of the entity to circumvent the access problems as quickly as possible.
A second potential negative situation occurs, with a wrong recipient of a message, but with correct access permissions. This second side effect relates to the incorrect addressing of a message such as an email to one or more individuals. In large organizations, it is common for a number of individuals to share the same name. While variations of name constructs are used to identify each individual user, it is still possible to send an email to the wrong person. While in such cases, the wrong recipient should not be able to access the entity, the message content may itself contain information not intended for the individual. The effect of this is that a user receives information not intended for them to see and will be correctly blocked from accessing the linked entities. A consequence of this is that a user may be exposed to privileged information contained within the body of a message.
It is therefore an object of the invention to improve upon the known art.